Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/109

 and unselfish, would furnish a community, as far as the practical working of the administrative machinery goes, better government than the majority of the citizens subject to changeable currents of public opinion—in all things except one. But this one thing is of the highest importance. Self-government as an administrator is subject to criticism for many failures. But it is impossible to overestimate self-government as an educator. The foreign observer in America is at once struck by the fact that the average of intelligence, as that intelligence manifests itself in the spirit of inquiry, in the interest taken in a great variety of things, and in alertness of judgment, is much higher among the masses here than anywhere else. This is certainly not owing to any superiority of the public school system in this country—or, if such superiority exists, not to that alone—but rather to the fact that here the individual is constantly brought into interested contact with a greater variety of things, and is admitted to active participation in the exercise of functions which in other countries are left to the care of a superior authority. I have frequently been struck by the remarkable expansion of the horizon effected by a few years of American life, in the minds of immigrants who had come from somewhat benighted regions, and by the mental enterprise and keen discernment with which they took hold of problems which, in their comparatively torpid condition in their native countries, they had never thought of. It is true that, in our large cities with congested population, self-government as an educator does not always bring forth the most desirable results, partly owing to the circumstance that government, in its various branches, is there further removed from the individual, so that he comes into contact with it and exercises his influence upon it only through various, and sometimes questionable, intermediary agencies, which frequently exert a very demoralizing influence. But